R U #SoLoMo Ready?

Stavros Papakonstantinidis, Athanasios Poulis, Prokopis Theodoridis

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781631572579
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

In today's highly cluttered digital marketing environment there is a great need for marketers to fully comprehend a new breed of consumers. This book introduces the rising trend of SoLoMo consumers who embrace an omnichannel marketing approach. Consumers are rapidly moving between channels and platforms, which is why marketers are finding it so difficult to implement an integrated marketing strategy. Today's consumers can check into a store with the use of a geolocation service (Foursquare), redeem an offer that is available, and share their comment on that platform. Then immediately they can post an update on their Facebook timeline, referencing the retailer's page. SoLoMo consumers have three basic characteristics: SOcial media engagement, LOcal findability, and smartphone MObility. The authors conceptualize this new marketing approach, and provide examples to illustrate the case. The SoLoMo phenomenon has completely changed the way marketers need to operate their campaigns, from the way they conceive of their relationship with the customer to the way they design and operate campaigns.

CHAPTER 1

The Rise of SoLoMo

In this chapter you will read:

• About the new marketing landscape

• Facts about social media

• Facebook facts

• Twitter facts

• LinkedIn facts

• Google+ facts

• Instagram facts

• Pinterest facts

• Other facts

• Social media’s impact on society

• About the SoLoMo consumer

Introduction

Nobody can predict the future. But as consumers change, marketing has to change too. Its role in the evolution of business is essential to identify and address the modern consumer behaviors. As a well-developed scientific field, marketing is constantly adapting its methods and strategies to fully meet the new consumer needs.

In Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, Jim Lecinski (2012, p.11) writes about the customer’s multiplatform journey that the shopper’s journey looks less like a funnel and more like a flight map. Shoppers dart back and forth as they touch down—again and again—not at cities but at all the information hubs on their journey. The new consumer starts his journey from online search engines (Lecinski, 2012). Other sources of influence such as traditional media (TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor, etc.) as well as in-store marketing in brick-and-mortar stores play a supplementary role.

According to Ericsson Mobility Report (2015), around 7.2 billion mobile subscriptions were reported in Q1 2015. Furthermore, 108 million new mobile users were added the first four months of 2015. What is more impressive is the report’s prognosis that smartphone subscriptions will be more than double by 2020, which means that 70 percent of the world’s population will own at least one smartphone. In addition, Ericsson Mobility Report (2015) forecasts the connected devices (smartphones, tablets, and phablets) will be 26 billion by 2020.

The digital world will be based on mobility as the numbers of mobile applications and mobile data traffic are rapidly increasing. The global digital agency “We are Social” argues in its Digital Statshot Report (Kemp, 2015) that mobile will help to push internet penetration beyond 50% of the world’s population during mid to late 2016. As connected devices and mobile data become more affordable, people will ubiquitously connect online, through a wide variety of mobile applications like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger achieving the top ranking spots in social media around the world.

The current and expected growth of connected devices in social networks develops a new marketing environment which will be based on three pillars.

1. Consumers are getting Social.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are growing rapidly as channels of human communication allowing brands and consumers to engage in public discussions. As consumers are using social media as their main source of information, communication, and entertainment, marketers will be finding a fruitful environment full of opportunities.

2. Consumers are checking Local.

The rapid proliferation of advanced smartphone and other mobile devices allowed people to exchange information by pinpointing consumers’ location and providing them on their mobile devices with location-specific advertisements. The integration of mobile advertising with location-based services is what characterizes location-based advertising.

3. Consumers are becoming Mobile.

As presented at Internet Trends 2015—Code Conference by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB)—mobile digital media time has already overtaken desktop and other media Internet access. Smartphone penetration has increased for two reasons. First, wireless networks have become faster and ubiquitous. Second, mobile devices are nowadays more affordable. Mobile marketing can provide consumers with personalized information based on their location and the time of receipt. To use simple words, consumers are more attached to their phones than their personal computers, providing marketers with new tools and opportunities to fish where the fish are.

This leads us to the assumption that the study of the convergence of social media expansion, location-based services, and mobile usage becomes a necessity in digital marketing. As mentioned above, SoLoMo stands out for Social, Local, and Mobile. It is an emerging marketing concept that can make use of modern digital marketing tools.

In today’s marketing environment everybody has a voice. Consumers have their own voice. Brands can reply. Social media is not simply used by people. Products and brands have their own accounts as well. For instance, the official match ball of the 2014 World Cup Brazuca was given human characteristics through a creative and anthropomorphic Twitter account. @Brazuca started tweeting seven months prior to the official start of the World Cup 2014. Adidas used Twitter in the most appropriate way to apply SoLoMo marketing, initiating a variety of human discussions with its over 3.4 million followers, including famous brand ambassadors such as David Beckham, Pharrel Williams, and Zinedine Zidane.

Using Brazuca’s Twitter hashtag, the #ballin is everywhere and anywhere. It is not anymore about simply selling. It is about establishing connections. Brands want to be like humans, and humans want to be like brands. Consumers are surrounded by a plethora of marketing tools and applications. Search engines, optimized websites, responsive platforms, Facebook pages, digital advertisements, video campaigns, Twitter accounts, Instagram hashtags, etc., are part of the game. Mobile marketing, location-based services, e-mail marketing with opt-in mailing lists, affiliate marketing, online public relations, article syndication, advertorials, referrals, and back links create a new marketing landscape in which the brand needs to have a loud and consistent voice. Otherwise, brands and consumers will never manage to meet. The following section provides a brief overview of the new marketing landscape.

The New Marketing Landscape

Advertising blooms from the early existence of humanity. People have the need to influence other people, using any mean they have. Until recently brands relied heavily on traditional marketing tools such as television ads, print ads, brochures, posters, and radio ads to communicate with their target markets. Now, with the rapid development of the Internet, brands communicate directly with their consumers seeking for immediate and accurate feedback.

The desire of every business or brand is primarily to approach new customers, then progressively to build relationships with them, and finally to convert them to loyal customers and lead them to purchasing. In that purpose, digital marketing has distinct differences from traditional marketing. In digital marketing the achievement of acquisition, conversion, and retention may be fulfilled with different manners (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). It depends on the product or service that someone wants to promote, the needs, or even the target audience that refers to. There is not an ideal marketing plan in the digital world; there are always different solutions.

We used to say that a marketing plan needs to master the 4Ps: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. Today, in addition to what traditional marketing dictates, we need to know what the customer thinks and how he or she behaves before, during, and after the purchase. Knowing the variety of different channels that can be used in the new marketing landscape, a consumer can be approached through a well-structured website, social networking sites, blogs, or mobile apps.

In order for a digital marketing campaign to be successful, it is crucial that both the online and offline marketing techniques have to integrate properly. Rolling out a digital marketing campaign can be challenging. Thus, a wise selection of acquisition, conversion, and retention tools is essential (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012) to guide modern consumers to their digital and physical customer journey.

In other words, the acquisition tools are used for starting the customer cycle, focusing on selecting the right target audience and emphasizing on establishing the relationship between the customer and the product. Conversion tools, on the other hand, aim to persuade customers to act by proceeding on the purchase of the product (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Finally, after the customer–product relationship has started, the brand’s main goal is to keep its existing customers and turn them into loyal, returning customers. In order to do so, retention tools are used, so that the company’s products will be always on the radar of the existing customers. To better illustrate the wide variety of available “stops” in customer journey, the following table classifies the acquisition, conversion, and retention tools in digital marketing (Econsultancy, 2014).

Today’s customer journey is greatly affected by social media, local marketing, and mobile applications. The following section discusses a 2014 study by Pew Research about teens, social media, and technology.

As smartphones and mobile telecommunication companies offer constant and high-speed online access, 92% of teenagers answered that they go online daily, and 24% almost constantly (Pew Research, 2015). Much of teenagers’ (aged 13–17) access is facilitated through mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), with Facebook (71%) being the most popular social media platform among them. In addition, according to Pew Research (2015), other than Facebook, the most popular social media platforms for teenagers are Instagram (52%), Snapchat (41%), Twitter (33%), Google+ (33%), Vine (24%), and Tumblr (14%).

It is quite impressive that YouTube is not one of teenagers’ options. Nevertheless, 71% of them logs in to more than one social networking sites. The terms social networking sites and Web 2.0 are widely discussed in a range of industries, such as advertising, marketing, web development, and human resources. Both terms, however, are elusive since they are constantly adjusting to new realities that online users shape. Social networks are the

“activities, practices, and behaviors among communities of people who gather online to share information, knowledge, and opinions using conversational networks. Conversational networks are web-based applications that make it possible to create and easily transmit content in the form of words, pictures, videos and audios” (Safko and Brake, 2009, p.6).

The narrow concept of social networks includes not only the well-versed social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it also consists of blogs (online journals), forums, wikis, and virtual worlds. In a wider definition, the social networks are referred by websites that share common characteristics in the sense of developing online communities that promote communication and self-expression (Santonocito, 2009). Social networks also include the more recent concepts of open-source-generated content, which is too technical to be discussed in this dissertation. Nevertheless, a main characteristic of social networks, although a bit simplistic, is that online users are able to generate content and to promote it through the web by sharing links with the online Web 2.0 communities.

The social networking sites affect the way companies promote their products, communicate with their consumers and employees, and recently organize their recruitment practices. An essential aspect of social networks is the need of online users to participate instead of simply retrieving information. Social networks users are willing to share personal information online. However, as Murugesan (2007) argues, they follow a set of rules and norms that do not violate the community’s expectations. This characteristic is what makes online social networks such a powerful communication and business tool.

The main characteristic of a social networking site is the sense of community that the traditional web sites cannot develop. Many examples of social networks prove that today’s administrations are gradually using it for their benefit. Social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and forums are low-cost advertising and communication platforms that further engagement with customers and users of the Internet (Miller and Lammas, 2010).

Facts about Social Media

The use of social networks is extremely popular among digital consumers. The numbers are dazzling. According to Kemp (2015), 3.65 billion users access the Web via their mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.). As per the official data given by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Instagram, and Pinterest, almost 1.7 billion people have active social media accounts.

It is almost impossible to define something that is constantly changing and adapting to new realities. Boyd and Ellison (2008) make an interesting distinction between the words network and networking. The authors argue that the term networking refers to connections among strangers while people network with those who know. Even if someone might claim that people use the social media to communicate with their friends, reality has shown that the social media allows users to interact with each other regardless their level of familiarity.

In an attempt, though, to explain what social networking sites are, Boyd and Ellison (2008, p.210) define them as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or a semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” The latter authors’ definition argues that the system in which online communication takes place has certain boundaries and limitations. In fact, scholars are still not clear as to the pure nature of those sites and their potentialities.

Social networking sites are online platforms designed by users who constantly add new features on the Internet to serve a wide and growing variety of consumer needs (Weaver and Morrison, 2008). It is almost impossible to provide an accurate number as to how many social networking sites are currently operating, or how many people are actually active on social media. Following, this section quotes from Digital Statshot Report (Kemp, 2015) some interesting statistics and facts about the most popular social networking sites.

Facebook facts

Facebook is the most popular social networking site with nearly 1.4 billion users (nearly 47% of all Internet users). Facebook was created in 2003 to primarily connect Harvard University classmates. Then it is expanded to connect friends in different universities in the United States, but soon it became widely known to the overall population. Facebook offers a wide range of features and applications to its users t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Setting the Scene
• Chapter 1 The Rise of SoLoMo
• Chapter 2 #Going_Social
• Chapter 3 #Staying_Local
• Chapter 4 #Being_Mobile
• Chapter 5 SoLoMo Tools and Applications
• Chapter 6 Where Is It All Going?
• References
• Index